Tuesday, May 31, 2011

While an inquiry has been launched by the Department of Agriculture, and progressive politicians are indeed calling for an end (or at least moratorium) to live cattle export to Indonesia, a taboo topic, which is most salient at this juncture, is being rather nonsensically ignored: These animals are slaughtered according to Islamic (Halal) tradition.

Why is it that not even the journalists of 4 Corners, with their impeccable integrity, could bring themselves to make this connection?

Wow I had no idea Malta made divorce illegal. I bet they are not going to be having the debate about gay marriages any time soon... America Magazine In All Things:

In a defeat for both the Catholic Church and the government, just over half of the voters of the Mediterranean island of Malta (pop. 412,000) voted Saturday to allow divorce. Malta is the last European country -- and one of the few left in the world -- where divorce is illegal.

Monday, May 30, 2011

There is a resurrection after death. Let this never be forgotten. The life that we live here in the flesh is not all. The visible world around us is not the only world with which we have to do. All is not over when the last breath is drawn, and men and women are carried to their long home in the grave. The trumpet shall one day sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. All that are in the graves shall hear Christ’s voice and come forth–those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of damnation. This is one of the great foundation truths of the Christian religion. Let us cling to it firmly, and never let it go.

If you're one of those people who totally knows the hidden will of God but then totally gets it wrong whenever you reveal that hidden will of God to the world then totally refuses to admit that you actually got it wrong, how might you use that skill in some other vocations?

The ordo salutis describes the process by which the work of salvation, wrought in Christ, is subjectively realized in the hearts and lives of sinners. It aims at describing in their logical order, and also in their interrelations, the various movements of the Holy Spirit in the application of the work of redemption. The emphasis is not on what man does in appropriating the grace of God, but on what God does in applying it.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Rob Forsyth, said it was ''complete nonsense'' to say Jesus was a prophet of Islam. ''Jesus was not the prophet of a religion that came into being 600 years later.''But the billboard was not offensive, he said.

''They've got a perfect right to say it, and I would defend their right to say it [but] … you couldn't run a Christian billboard in Saudi Arabia.''

The bishop said he would pay for billboards to counter those of MyPeace if he could afford it, and ''maybe the atheists should run their billboards as well''

He says the practice of trying to ensure there is enough for everyone is as old as the Bible, which contains passages relating to the need to leave some of what is harvested for refugees, orphans and widows.

Dumpster diving also ties in with other issues such as supporting local farmers and reducing the greenhouse effect

Friday, May 27, 2011

My aim in this interview is to bring out and clarify what Rick Warren believes about these biblical doctrines. In doing this my hope is that the thousands of pastors and lay people who look to Rick for inspiration and wisdom will see the profound place that doctrine has in his mind and heart.

Usually, at 10:45 a.m., I’ll stop what I’m doing and spend 15 minutes reading. After my 15 minutes is up I go back to what I was doing. I do the same at 2:45 p.m.. I can maybe get 30 pages read with both slots (I told you I was a slow reader). If I do that over every day of the week, that’s 150 pages—a small book or half of a big one.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

A marriage requires two components or elements. The first is old school sexual intercourse and the second is a socially recognized set of vows, committing the couple to a legally recognized and protected state of marriage. If one or the other is missing, then so is the marriage.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

My usual counter question is: “Why are Americans so fixated on hell?” Far more Americans ask me about hell than ever happens in my own country. And I really want to know, why is it that the most prosperous affluent nation on earth is really determined to be sure that they know precisely who is going to be frying in hell and what the temperature will be and so on. There’s something quite disturbing about that, especially when your nation and mine has done quite a lot in the last decade or two to drop bombs on people elsewhere and to make a lot of other people’s lives hell. So, I think there are some quite serious issues about why people want to ask that question.

This links to the whole journal (which I have not read) but the second article on the OT and Evangelical Hermeneutics I skimmed through and it looked good: Foundations Journal Spring 2011.pdf

Genre identification is important for interpretation. Often a text will give clear signals. Just as ‘Once upon a time’ indicates that it is fairy tale and ‘On 11 September 2001’ tells us that it is history, so in Scripture ‘There was a certain man’ typically introduces a parable whereas ‘Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai’ announces that it is history. Some commentators will allow for the opinion that the book of Jonah is a parable, even though the evidence is against it, because such a view does not prevent us from learning its message. In the case of Daniel 1-6, it is much more difficult to make room for Lucas’ treatment of the genre because in this case it would undermine the text’s purpose and pastoral effectiveness: to supply encouragement to those under stress for their faith. It also runs counter to the evidence

"On May 21, this last weekend, this is where the spiritual aspect of it really comes through,' said Camping. 'God again brought judgment on the world. We didn't see any difference but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world. The whole world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct. 21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed.'

AN evangelical offshoot of Hillsong Church has opened a 'School of the Supernatural' offering a course it reportedly says teaches the power to cure cancer, help women conceive and bring the dead back to life.

Monday, May 23, 2011

This is a video preview about a book on Hell. Like Rob Bell, Francis Chan is a good communicator and they both have their own short video series. I think Chan's book might not be as controversial as Bell's, but it might be more biblical: YouTube - Hell: We can't afford to get it wrong.

I think a secularist has only one substitute left for God, only one experience in a desacrilized world that still gives him something like the mystical, self-transcending thrill of ecstasy that God designed all souls to have forever, and to long for until they have it. Unless he is a surfer, that experience has to be sex. We’re designed for more than happiness; we’re designed for joy. Aquinas writes, with simple logic, “Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of true spiritual joys must spill over to carnal pleasures.”

This looks like it could be a good conference, it is run by Acts 29, so I assume they will put the audio up for free. Speakers: Mark Driscoll. D.A. Carson, Matt Chandler, Scott Thomas and Jeff Vanderstelt: Acts 29 Network: Seattle, WA > San Jose Boot Camp

But Centre for Public Christianity director John Dickson is unfazed by Camping's warning, saying he will be enjoying a glass of wine with his wife on Saturday, and preaching a sermon on Sunday morning.

And though he is relaxed about his own fate, Dr Dickson is critical of such predictions because they can cause a crisis of faith for some Christians.

'It's often harder for young people to come out as Christians than it would be for them to come out as gay,' she says. 'Because of the vocal atheists – Dawkins and so on – people think your judgement is impaired if you say you're Christian at work. The problem of serving two masters is at the heart of it. There's a worry that Christians are up to something, that they're loyal to something other than the firm.'

William Taylor, the rector of St Helen's, is a tall, dashing fellow. An army officer before becoming a priest, he speaks in the relaxed tones of the mess hall. There is a reading from Luke's Gospel, then Taylor carries out a detailed analysis of the text, peppering his talk with whimsical anecdotes and corny jokes. The audience leaves knowing a little more about the Bible, but it strikes me that what was really useful for these City workers was to escape from their desks for a while. Groups cluster outside after, chatting in the spring sunshine.

"His [Hawking] opinion has less to do with his scientific expertise than his situation of facing imminent death for the last half century... His view of life after death is not a scientific view, and his eminence as a scientist is irrelevant to his opinion. Other equally eminent academic scientists, hold the opposite view to him on this subject. The media does not ask them because they are not media celebrities. Their opinion is not considered important because it is outside their field of expertise."

First, transitional forms are found in the fossil record, and more are being found all the time as research continues. They tend to be reported in the literature in rather specialized language. This one is particularly interesting and made at least an appearance in the more popular literature.

I can make the mistake of coupling faith to the musical experience by assuming that the power and effectiveness of music is what brings substance and evidence to my faith. I can then quite easily forge a connection between the power of music and the nearness of the Lord. Once this happens, I may even slip fully into the sin of equating the power of music and the nearness of the Lord. At that point music joins the bread and wine in the creation of a new sacrament or even a new kind of transubstantiation.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The U.N. has, I believe, collected and identified five genders among the children of men, and thus it is that we now have LGBT, with S in the implied background. Others have begun adding Q, just to top things off, but you may rest assured that the fetish community (F) and the animal-lovers community (A) will not rest until they too are accepted. It may take a while to get gaybashers on the list, not only because G and B are already in use, and because bigotry runs deep, but also because no one seems to understand that gaybashers get aroused when they express themselves this way. But once science has shown the existence of the moral absolute that blood flow to certain regions of the body always establishes, then we will be done. Until we discover that bigotry has found a new fortress and hideout, which it no doubt will, pretending as is bigotry's wont, that little children should be off limits.

The excellent BUGB news sweep highlights Mark Driscoll in Belfast [link opens MP3 download] offering his views on congregational government and missional church life. The headline ‘it is almost impossible to be both congregational and missional’. Some thoughts occur to me in listening, that seem worth recording just because Driscoll makes mistakes that seem to me to be endemic:

He thinks Dawkins has his finger on a significant problem but doesn’t think he reads his Bible well.

...I have to say this: both Brian McLaren and Rob Bell have drawn attention to their ideas because of their seeming authenticity when it comes to negative ideas in the Bible — but in the process I think both shirked the hard work of bringing the negative and positive together. David Lamb, so I think, has done this hard work and I commend this book to you.

In a friendly exchange, Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald asked Mark Dever why he does not have a multi-site church. His response: “The word ekklēsia in the New Testament means assembly.” For Dever, multi-site churches do not have biblical warrant because, according to the meaning of the word commonly translated church, all of its members must be able to assemble together, and multi-site churches are not designed for such a common assembly.

Today, I scan the pages of God of the Possible, and find error that maligns the glory of God written in my own handwriting. It sobers me, and it cautions me that I am still prone towards error today. It reminds me that I could have gone another way, but God in his infinite mercy and hidden will designed that in my error he would send messengers to lead me to his truth.

Reflecting on this episode instructs me to be more patient, as my counselors were, with others who are now in ostensible error

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it - most people in England haven't. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics - namely, not much.

I first began thinking about note-taking in relation to what preaching is when I heard Tim Keller say in a sermon, 'I don't mind if you take notes at the beginning of a message, but if you're still taking notes at the end, I feel like I haven't brought it home.' I thought to myself, 'Hmmm.'

Having spoken at conferences for various groups over the years, I’m amazed that the faces of attendees are starting to get familiar. Such conference Christians somehow make the rounds between seemingly all the big events. I have literally had a photo taken with some people at five or six different conferences in a single year. These are usually single white guys from decent families who treat preaching the way other guys do porn—obsessed with it and devoting hours to it every day. Here are my concerns with conference Christians:

Supposedly the Rapture is coming this Saturday, May 21. Didn't you know? I mean, thank God someone put together two and two in time so we could all be ready. I believe the proof comes from multiplying Jesus by Isaac to the power of the burning bush.

What would I do if one of my adult children converted to Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism? No worries on that score, for all three of my kids have burrowed into the woodwork of Puritanism, but work with me here. What should my response be?

In that circumstance, I would step down from the ministry, and this is why.

Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.

Really listen to other preachers. We listen to many sermons, but often we don’t hear the sermons that we listen to. In other words, we are often captivated by rhetorical and stylistic matters, important in their own right, yet fail to hear the actual content, logical flow, and biblical fabric that is at the heart of the best sermons. To really hear is to break down (not cynically but searchingly) what we hear in a sermon, to plug it into the one story plot line of the bible, and to press it into our own hearts.

I happily note that N.T. Wright suggests the same interpretation. He writes that the usual English past-time translation, “‘which has been proclaimed,’ might seem to stand in the way of this view. But there is some question whether the aorist participle here (kēruchthentos) as has this kind of time significance. Aorist adjectival participles can sometimes be simply ‘definitional’; i.e., here, ‘the proclaimed-in-creation gospel.’”

Sunday, May 15, 2011

i've always thought that it was the bad people that would be taken away in Luke 17, which makes it mean the complete opposite to what the rapture people make it to mean: I Want to Be “Left Behind” – Justin Taylor:

Just as in the days of Noah the people were taken away by the great flood, so those who are not prepared will be taken away when the Son of Man returns.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Dissatisfied with your current small-group? You might want to check out this one. “We hate bad theology as much as the next guy. And we know the surest way to prevent bad theology is to avoid theology altogether.”

Do you know how many hundreds if not thousands of preachers will throw it all away this year by crawling into some woman’s pants in their church, committing adultery and destroying the ministry they have spent years preparing for and building? Why? Because when they were young they never learned to say no. Do you want your life to stink and end up struggling with commitments for the next sixty years all because you haven’t learned it?

“In China I told pastors about how, in the West, we have these church buildings and how we go to services each week that last an hour or so. I told them how if we don’t like the music or the message then we can go to different buildings and services… They all broke out into laughter. They thought I was the funniest guy they had ever seen.”

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

A.C. Grayling, a British professor of philosophy, recently published a secular version of the Bible, 'The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.' To create his scriptures, Grayling has rewritten thoughts from many sages of the past in archaic language that evokes the King James Bible. His humanist Bible has sections titled Genesis, Proverbs and Epistles.

all of us who weigh in with our opinions about this, from Chomsky to Sheryl Crowe, should be prepared to answer and fundamental question about this. The question is, 'By what standard?' What laws, whether of men, gods, or God, govern this kind of thing? Without an answer to this question, all opinions are just aimless yelling and gesticulating at the scene after the men of action have come and gone. One of the bummers related to the triumph of secular thought is the realization that you cannot banish transcendent standards and still have them around. This is a drag because there are times when they would be handy, like now.

A friend of mine pointed out, years ago, that in Dante's Inferno, the homosexuals and the usurers (people who lend money at interest), are in adjoining parts of hell. The sin of Sodom is homosexuality, the sin of Gomorrah is usury. Homosexuality is unproductive sex, usury is unproductive money.

I worry that many young parents are a) too adamant about the particulars of their parenting or b) too sure that every decision will set their kids on an unalterable trajectory to heaven or hell. It’s like my secretary at the church once told me: “Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents around, and both are wrong.” Could it be we’ve made parenting too complicated? Isn’t the most important thing not what we do but who we are as parents? They will see our character before they remember our exact rules regarding television and twinkies.

Ablow begins by quoting actress Cameron Diaz, who recently asserted that marriage is a “dying institution.” She added this comment: “I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer.” Well, maybe that says a lot about her own world of experience and influence, but it is a breathtakingly audacious statement. It also reflects a view held by many among the intellectual and cultural elites, among whom marriage has been seen as a retrograde institution for some time

Monday, May 9, 2011

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

I don’t believe our goal as Bible or theology scholars is to be deemed among the finest of scholars or to find a place at the table, but to be faithful to Jesus Christ and to the gospel and to orthodox theology and to academic rigor

Friday, May 6, 2011

here’s my challenge: let me know if you’ve seen an alumni magazine from a Christian college that spotlights mothers, not mothers who also dance in the ballet and spin centrifuges, but mothers who are “just” mothers.

And a bonus challenge, this one for our fine Christian colleges: we’d love to see how proud you are of the half of your graduates putting their education to good use by helping their husbands, raising kids, serving in the church, and doing a hundred other amazing things that don’t look impressive to most people but should look impressive to us.

Despite a series of initiatives such as Back to Church Sunday and some improvement in the numbers of young people participating in church activities, attendance figures amongst Anglicans have dropped by some 10 per cent over the last decade. Only 1.1m people, some 2 per cent of the population, attend church on a weekly basis, and only 1.7m, or 3 per cent, once a month. This in spite of the fact that around half the population still profess themselves Anglicans.

The decline in paid clergy has been even more rapid. On the Church’s own statistics, the beginning of the new millennium has already seen a fall in over 20 per cent to barely 8,000. On present trends clergy would disappear altogether within half a century.

One thing, at all events, is very clear–it is never too soon to strive and pray for the salvation of the souls of children–never too soon to speak to them as moral beings, and tell them of God, Christ, right and wrong. The devil, we may be quite sure, loses no time in endeavoring to influence the minds of young people. He begins with them even from childhood. Let us work hard to counteract him.

And yet, there are two troubling aspects that linger. The first is the open celebration in the streets. While we should all be glad that this significant threat is now removed, death in itself is never to be celebrated. Such celebration points to the danger of revenge as a powerful human emotion. Revenge has no place among those who honor justice. Retributive justice is sober justice. The reason for this is simple — God is capable of vengeance, which is perfectly true to his own righteousness and perfection — but human beings are not. We tend toward the mismeasure of justice when it comes to settling our own claims. All people of good will should be pleased that bin Ladin is no longer a personal threat, and that his death may further weaken terrorist plans and aspirations. But revenge is not a worthy motivation for justice, and celebration in the streets is not a worthy response.

The Bayly brothers have helpfully provided a portion of a transcript in which Tim Keller is being interviewed, and is asked about what the church's approach to homosexuality should be. Presented with this golden opportunity, I am afraid that Keller whiffed it.